TW #5 — What it's like to be a PC Musician (Necros)

author Necros / FM (Andy Sega)
date 1995-04-13
article 1. What it's like to be a PC Musician (or, the Secret Life of a Ring-Tailed Lemur)
created 2026-08-30 · updated 2026-08-30

necros on "fame" in the tracker scene, signed "Andy, aka. Necros / FM" (asega@ic.sunysb.edu).

Key claims#

  • A month of mail: 500+ list messages, dozens of "nice stuff", requests for old releases, "When will dissonance #2 be out?", questions about the dead diskmag Signals.
  • The plus side of his whole career: $400 from game profits, a free 210 MB hard disk, a trip to Canada to the Quebec demoscene, a cat traumatised by "every single version of HyperControl". The minus side: 1,623 hours at the monitor "trying desperately to bring life to the same tired old samples", a lost girlfriend, 25 % hearing loss from a Sound Blaster amplifier.
  • The point: "if you are going to track anything at all … do it FOR YOURSELF"; the ecstasy of turning "half-baked arcane garbage from my head" into "harmonic bliss" is what gets you through. "Hmm, then again, maybe I should do another chip tune."

Relevance#

Sourced identity for necros (Andy Sega, FM, HyperControl) and a motivation piece for tracking-workflow.

Pages touched#

necros, tracking-workflow.

source file wiki/summaries/s-tw005-what-its-like-to-be-a-pc-musician.md · graph